While city officials are rushing to put together proposals, urban thinkers are aghast at these so-called reverse RFPs. Amy Liu, who runs Brookings Institution’s prominent Metropolitan Policy Program and spoke to NPR about Amazon’s process, said that “It’s created a major distraction from what the real day-to-day economic development activity should be.” Which, apparently, is not job creation.

Critics too often focus on the tax incentives while ignoring the fact that these economic development proposals are often lifelines for infrastructure projects that will otherwise never see the light of day.

Ideally, governments could debate, vote, and then fund these sorts of infrastructure projects and community improvements. The reality is that without a time-sensitive forcing function like a reverse RFP process, there is little hope that cities and states will make progress on these sorts of projects. The debates can literally go on forever in American democracy.

So if you are a mayor or economic planning official, use these processes as tools to get stuff done. Use the allure of new jobs and tax revenues to spur infrastructure spending and get a rezoning through a recalcitrant city council. Use that “prosperity bomb” to upgrade old parts of the urban landscape and prepare the city for the future. A healthier, more humane city can be just around the corner.

Now, there are a lot of critics of these reverse RFPs, and they have valid points. They could be non-democratic, in the sense that the infrastructure built or the incentives offered might ultimately be valuable to the company and not the citizens of a community.

This is relatively unlikely in the case of Amazon and other tech companies, given that their technical workforces are highly-mobile and choose cities with quality urban amenities. If Amazon showed up and said “cut the taxes and eliminate mass transit,” they would be undercutting the very talent they were hoping to reach. In other words, there are market limits here, and Amazon’s urban goals are in many ways aligned with urban dwellers.

The second criticism is around the tax incentives themselves. There are valid questions on whether governments should subsidize companies to switch borders, particularly when companies are leveraging cities off each other. Even so, corporate subsidies are nothing new, nor is the controversy they stoke.

Finally, there is the “prosperity bomb” crowd, otherwise known as the anti-growth crowd. The challenges that cities have faced in attracting businesses goes back to these people, who oppose new construction, who oppose new housing, and who desperately cling to a past of a “residentialist” city rather than seizing the moment to grow the next global city.

To whom I say: go right ahead and vote.

No one has to be left behind in these projects. It doesn’t have to be zero-sum. But cities can no longer act as if workers and companies have no choice on location and are forced to accept suboptimal cities as a result. The reality is that the market will work, and those cities with slim ambitions are going to be dwarfed by cities with the vision and thought to boldly build for the 21st century. Ultimately, that choice lies with the cities and not with Amazon.